Two Immigration myths

Comment on: http://labornotes.org/2011/10/alabama-workers-meet-harsh-immigration-law-wildcats

Nice article, thanks!

However, I take issue with this section:

Farmworkers, their families, and tax dollars have fled harshly anti-immigrant states like Arizona and Georgia in search of friendlier states, so farm owners have turned to probationers and prisoners on work-release programs to fill the void.

But those workers have been unable to keep up with the requirements of these backbreaking jobs, many quitting after just hours in the sun and leaving farm owners to watch their crops rot in the fields.

In the process, they dispel the myth that immigrants are “stealing our jobs,” confirming that citizens are simply not interested in such exhausting and low-wage work.

Fox News Latino reported that on one Georgia cucumber farm, some Mexican and Guatemalan laborers were accustomed to filling 200 buckets before lunch, bucking for incentive pay. The fastest probationer filled only 134 buckets in a day.

 This section, unfortunately, may dispel a myth, but actually perpetuates a far more pernicious one: that immigrant workers are "a breed apart." To suggest that immigrant workers are so fundamentally different in makeup from native-born that they won't hold the same jobs re-creates the kind of "alienism" that kept black workers in a subordinate position for so many years - and was also used as a reason to bar them from white unions. By denying that one worker can be replaced by another, you remove a key element of solidarity.

I know that this is not your intent. I understand that you are trying to allay fears that immigrants undermine native-born wage earners. Unfortunately, any workers who are denied their civil and economic rights will inevitably undermine the wages of other workers.

In your eagerness, you are committing a serious error.

Thanks again for your otherwise very useful reporting.

In solidarity,
Sam

Goodwin: Chaotic Economic Dynamics (1990) PREFACE

 Preface to "Chaotic Economic Dynamics" by Richard M. Goodwin (1990)


THE origin of this collection of short essays was a series of seminars given in 1988 at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. My aim has been to elaborate the central conceptual framework of the modern industrial economy. In this sense it derives from the formulation of the problem by my teacher and friend Joseph Schumpeter. Though a neoclassical economist, he perceived the essentially evolutionary nature of the industrialized nations.

By comparison with the natural sciences, economics suffers from the lack of a solid empirical foundation based on generally valid experimental data. To make up for this deficiency, an ingenious substitute has been elaborated with great subtlety and considerable success. The method consists in asking what would a rational man (now fashionably called an 'agent') do when confronted by the manifold problems of an economic nature: he is alleged to maximize his utility or his satisfactions, by minimizing his costs and maximizing his profits or his gains of whatever sort he desires.

Under the banner of General Equilibrium Theory, this has been developed into an imposing analytic web of how a system of a large number of such agents would interact in a unified market mechanism. This programme, in an increasingly mathematical form, has produced impressive results, which may be considered 'mainstream' economics. Some tentative efforts at a kind of experimental economics have raised serious doubts about this 'rational' behaviour.